Abstract: From soon after their first birthdays young children are able to make inferences from a communicator’s referential act (e.g., pointing to a container) to her overall social goal for communication (e.g., to inform that a searched-for toy is inside; see Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2005; Behne, Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2012). But in such cases the inferential distance between referential act and communicative intention is still fairly close, as both container and searched-for toy lie in the direction of the pointing gesture. In the current study we tested 18- and 26-month-old children in a situation in which referential act and communicative goal were more distant: In the midst of a game, the child needed a certain toy. The experimenter then held up a key (that they knew in common ground could be used to open a container) to the child ostensively. In two control conditions the experimenter either inadvertently moved the key and so drew the child’s attention to it non-ostensively or else held up the key for her own inspection intentionally but non-communicatively. Children of both ages took only the ostensive showing of the key, not the accidental moving or the non-ostensive but intentional inspection of the key, as an indirect request to take the key and open the container to retrieve the toy inside. From soon after they start acquiring language young children thus are able to infer a communicator’s social goal for communication not only from directly-referential acts, but from more indirect communicative acts as well.

Abstract: When children are learning a novel object label, they tend to exclude as possible referents familiar objects for which they already have a name. In the current study, we wanted to know if children would behave in this same way regardless of how well they knew the name of potential referent objects, specifically, whether they could only comprehend it or they could both comprehend and produce it. Sixty-six monolingual German-speaking 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children participated in two experimental sessions. In one session the familiar objects were chosen such that their labels were in the children’s productive vocabularies, and in the other session the familiar objects were chosen such that their labels were only in the children’s receptive vocabularies. Results indicated that children at all three ages were more likely to exclude a familiar object as the potential referent of the novel word if they could comprehend and produce its name rather than comprehend its name only. Indeed, level of word knowledge as operationalized in this way was a better predictor than was age. These results are discussed in the context of current theories of word learning by exclusion.

Abstract: Three studies investigated 3-year-old children’s ability to determine a speaker’s communicative intent when the speaker’s overt utterance related to that intent only indirectly. Studies 1 and 2 examined children’s comprehension of indirectly stated requests (e.g., “I find Xs good” can imply, in context, a request for X; N = 32). Study 3 investigated 3- and 4-year-old children’s and adults’ (N = 52) comprehension of the implications of a speaker responding to an offer by mentioning an action’s fulfilled or unfulfilled precondition (e.g., responding to an offer of cereal by stating that we have no milk implies rejection of the cereal). In all studies, 3-year-old children were able to make the relevance inference necessary to integrate utterances meaningfully into the ongoing context.

Abstract: Two people talking to each other seem to understand each other effortlessly most of the time. But what’s that mutual comprehension based on? First of all, communication is a special form of cooperative behavior (Grice 1989; Tomasello 2008). That is, both participants – communicator and recipient – mutually know that the communicator is trying to get messages across in the manner most efficient for mutual comprehension. This in turn licenses the recipient to make an effort understanding the speaker’s meaning. To understand the communicator correctly, the recipient quite often has to make inferences that go beyond the superficial meaning communicated by the use of linguistic means – for instance when the communicator tries to convey additional meaning such as implications, emotions, or does not use linguistic means at all (as is the case in pointing). Making inferences is based on the assumption that the communicator produced the communicative behavior cooperatively; that is, the recipient assumes that the communicator had a communicative intention, a social goal (which she tries to figure out) and a referential intention (which gives her a notion what the communicator is communicating about). Therefore, signalling and understanding intentions is at the core of communication.

Abstract: In pragmatics, it is widely accepted that the overall meaning of an utterance performed as part of a verbal interchange ist underdetermined by the meaning of the sentence uttered. Speaker meaning has to be considered at a complex utterance level combining semantic knowledge and context-driven, pragmatic information as an integrated whole. The focus of this book is on the nature, function, and acquisition of pragmatic inferencing strategies.